the rise and fall of jake thackray

Not rock and roll to start the year but the story of a most unusual folk singer and songwriter who, thanks to a recent DVD taken from BBC archive footage, tells the story of Jake Thackray. (Last Octobers release "Jake Thackray And Songs"). Not that he was an obscure performer in the way Nick Drake had been in the era, by the late 1960's and next decade or so Thackray could be seen and heard on countless television and radio shows in the UK notching up some 1000 performances by the end of the 70's. His songs appealing to producers of weekly magazine and satirical shows thanks to his quick wit of being able to rapidly turn out topical and humorous songs.

An accomplished guitar player, and it was always a nylon stringed classical guitar, accompanied a voice with a broad Yorkshire accent that's maybe as tricky to pick at first as a country Texan drawl can be to the unfamiliar listener. His dead pan expression often with a slightly clipped delivery to his sweet and sour songs can be very sad or very defiant or very rude. He'll always say seriously before beginning one of those "This song is offensive".
The Thackray folk song was less protest, more defiant of popular taste. His early appearances on TV were greeted with howls of protest by some outraged viewers of conservative tastes who saw the songs as bawdy and promiscuous. Well it was the 60's and society had plenty of indignation about anything not fully laced up.
But after a few appearances many more had taken Thackray to their hearts and his songs could be heard consistently until the 80's when like many other songwriters of the previous 2 decades his popularity waned and slowly disappeared from view.
Along with bassist Alan Williams, guitarist John Etheridge (Soft Machine etc) was one of the few people that actually accompanied Thackray on a couple of gigs that also appear in the video "a great guy and much loved .. old school, very self deprecating, honest and full of integrity".

His style of work was falling out of fashion: his literate, witty lyrics and tales of rural Yorkshire had little resonance in the punk and Thatcher years, folk audiences had lost interest in contemporary song, and in the days of alternative comedy his bawdy humour was deemed sexist and outdated.
WIKI ARTICLE

He continued on in small pubs, always happier in more intimate surroundings even at his most popular, until plagued by a self-doubt and a breakdown in confidence he retired from performance in the early 90's and then in 2000 beset by health and financial problems he become an alcoholic and declared bankrupt. His inevitable end came just 2 years later.

Jake Thackray was one of the most unusual and original songwriters of his day, overlooked by many, misunderstood by some but to a sizeable following of his fans is nothing short of a legend. Which he would have derided.

In an interview on the BBC's Culture Show (broadcast 8 August 2009), Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys cited Thackray as an influence, and in another 2009 interview with XM Radio Turner cited Thackray when specifically discussing their song entitled "Cornerstone." Similarly the Courteeners' songwriter Liam Fray cites Thackray as influence on the group's MySpace page.
WIKI ARTICLE

Here's an excellent video of him performing 'The Hair of the Widow of Bridlington' live at the Cambridge Folk Festival on the 9th of September 1981.
A story of a woman victimised for her simple pleasures.. as it were.

January

thyme of the season

From the Southern English Midlands with an eye towards the crystalline acid folk of Pentangle and rougher hue of Trees.

This is how The Lords Of Thyme describe themselves on their soundcloud profile and there really is no better description than that. Maybe mention there is a reflection of Nick Drake deep in the sound of 'Park Song'. But then Nick Drake's music was of the very time the 'Lords Of Thyme' are evoking here. Park Song has it's soul in psychedelic folk of the sixties and has much a place in the genre as any of the legends.
Taken from their new EP out in October, it's available through Sunstone Records who seem to be selling out there releases rather nicely.
As did the second track 'Proud Maisre' taken from their last release and is as every bit a perfect piece of traditional English Folk as you'll find, with the golden voice of Michelle Griffiths (we think) making her entry from about half way into the song. Hardly surprising this sold out.
Lets hope this stuff is going on vinyl too. They have live dates coming up in November, see their facebook for details.

the unbelievable tragedy of judee sill

In David McGowans recently published and controversial book, Wierd Scenes Inside The Canyon, of all the rock star lives in and around Laurel Canyon in the 60's and 70's there are 3 pages on the little known singer/songwriter Judee Sill that standout as one of the most jaw-dropping accounts of any artist. In fact you could go as far to say of almost any musician there's been in the last 50 years.
The tragedy and torment of this woman's life began early in her years. At the age of 8 losing her father followed shortly after by her brother had led to her mother remarrying an "abusive and violent alcoholic". No surprise then that at the age of 15 Judee fled her home life, but took up with an older man who no doubt would have had a leading part in the pair of them committing several armed robberies.

What comes first, the crimes or the drugs and alcohol.
After a time in reform school for the crime spree she'd now arrived at a "serious heroin addiction" which naturally needed continual upkeep. End result, drug dealing and prostitution. She's not even out of her teenage years!
1963 and the 19 year old Judee has attempted to clean up and enroll in college for a fresh start.
But now her Mother dies, Judee's last remaining family member. And that begins her falling into more drugs and crime. Now she's arrested and "possibly serves time".
So now if there's a few years without the lure of dope it's quite possible she did serve a sentence, either that or her will to quit was more than remarkable, because by the end of the 60's and now in her mid twenties she was composing and contributing to the burgeoning Laurel Canyon scene, even selling a song to The Turtles.
There in Laurel Canyon there were stories of her bisexuality and of her interest in the occult. Although that's nothing new for 60's Laurel Canyon.
Within this new found community she fittingly signed for 'Asylum' records, there were a few living in the Canyon who also joined that label, and in 1970 released her first album and a single produced by Graham Nash (of Hollies and CSN&Y fame). Who she toured with supporting the new album.
The LP failed to sell after a badly timed release against The Eagles and Jackson Brown's albums also debuting on Asylum.
The second album was released but did worse. Some say she was sacked by label boss David Geffen after outing him "gay" on radio, others say it was for criticising Geffen for the lack of promotion.
Her 3rd album she abandoned before completion in 1974 and with that Judee Sill just disappeared.

It's said she had serious back trouble after a car crash and the drugs returned as a result to take the pain away.. or maybe just to forget the pain.
The cause of her death in 1979 was given as "acute cocaine and codeine intoxication". By the time of her death she was completely forgotten. There wasn't one obituary.

It's said her songs give little away of herself, and "She liked to talk in flowery metaphors, often with a veiled religious tinge to them".
Judee Sill's music is born of another age yet 1/4 million hits on this video say it's music that connects to many listeners today.
Here is a rare clip of her performing on the BBC's 'The Old Grey Whistle Test' in 1973. Host, Bob Harris makes mention after her previous visit to the studios, she'd said "Please buy my record so I don't have to open up for these snotty rock stars anymore", a likely reference to the touring with Nash and Crosby as their opening act preceding her first album.
As you see this diminutive and almost fragile looking woman sing her delicate formal songs it's hard to reconcile the song and the image with the tumultuous and ultimately tragic life she was to have.

RIP pete seeger 1919 – 2014

There is probably nothing more important to represent the life of folk singer Pete Seeger than this -

"his signature instrument, the 5-string banjo. The well-worn face of Seeger’s banjo decorated with the message, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.” The banjo head was donated to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland in 2010. " New York Times

See this excellent New York Times obituary if you need to know why Pete Seeger was important to American music.

"Turn,Turn, Turn" is one of Pete Seeger's most well known songs made a hit in 1965 by The Byrds.

roy harper track revealed

At last we get to hear a track from Roy Harper's much anticipated new album 'Man And Myth', his first for 13 years.. It's the first one he's allowed to be previewed from what the critics are describing as a 5 star release.
Back a year ago their had been an idea to performing some of the songs when they had recorded in the States but that was shut down.
Harper explained when he spoke in an interview with Folk Radio UK around that time.

"Whatever you do nowadays, it’ll be on YouTube the next day, we're under-rehearsed, we haven’t seen each other for months, and we’re not going to present something that’s half-cocked for people to see on YouTube. I hate seeing something on YouTube I’ve done the next day, something that’s not quite right. I can’t blame them, they’re fans, but those like us who like to get things right are horrified! So the short answer is no. But that was the plan…"

Anyway that's a year ago, now the track being let go for us is "Time is Temporary". A melancholy lament that reminds a little of Leonard Cohen's delivery but with Roy you always get a musical twist with careful punctuation and an unexpected chord sequence, and of course the guitar playing is in top form. Folk fans will approve the master.
There's just a few select gigs this autumn for those in the UK.
Tue 22 October – LONDON – Royal Festival Hall
Fri 25 October – MANCHESTER – Bridgewater Hall
Sun 27 October – BRISTOL – Colston Hall

Anybody else think that widget picture looks like Willie Nelson?

the lomax collection

If there's one thing the internet is really good at it's archiving. And here is one massive archive of Alan Lomax's field recordings of folk music traditions from around the world.
Lomax worked from the 1930s to the ‘90s, and travelled from the Deep South to the mountains of West Virginia, all the way to Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. The Association for Cultural Equity, the nonprofit organization he founded in New York in the ‘80s have digitised 17,000 sound recordings taken throughout his career.
For anyone interested in the origins of music it's a goldmine, eg. here's the extensive blues archive. Just click the arrow by the name and you'll here voices from America's blues history come alive once more.
There are also video recordings, radio programs, photographs, discussions and interviews. This amazing resource of lost treasures waiting to be found is all free to access. Here's the main site : culturalequity.org

In the 1970's Alan Lomax also added video recordings to his collection.
Here's Belton Sutherland (vocal and guitar) performing an improvised blues on Clyde Maxwell's porch. Shot by Alan Lomax, John Bishop, and Worth Long at Maxwell's farm near Canton, Mississippi, September 3, 1978.

gerde's folk club, new york city, 1961

52 years ago today in a Gerde's Folk Club, New York City, John Lee Hooker headlined a night which also included a young musician playing his first live gig.
There are no recordings of Bob Dylan's live performance, but here is the set list -
Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance
Talkin' New York
Corrina Corrina
Deep Ellem Blues
Blowin' in the Wind

And here is John Lee playing Tupelo from around the same time.

keith christmas

Yes we know, it's more than an obvious link.. Keith Christmas at Christmas. He's one of UK's almost lost folk singers from the late 1960's and for Keith this year has happily brought something of a regeneration as a return to live performance and now producing his own CD recorded by himself at one of his gigs last year.
"..it was something of an after thought.. I worked out a way through my computer, set up the mics and the recording equipment and took a gamble on it working. I had no idea how it would come out. But when I listened to it I was amazed at the quality"
(go to KCBlues.co.uk for more)
extract from an interview with Simon Euan-Smith. Record Collector. 2012.
Ah Keith, wouldn't it nice to have been able to have done things as easy as that back in the day.
Oh yes, and part of the Keith Christmas legend is he played at the very first Glastonbury festival in 1970.
It's really good to hear the modern technology has given a genuine folk singer a chance to reach his audience again. Keith's a really good guitar player and had some voice back then.. here's a track called Evensong from the album Pigmy.

bob dylan's tempest

1962 to 2012 and the Bob Dylan story continues. On the 50th anniversary of his debut LP 'Bob Dylan', the latest release has been greeted with rapturous applause all round. Rarely do the music press agree on a 5 star rating across the board but it would be unlikely few other artist's have received such plaudits on their 35th album after 50 years!
A truly inspiring creative statement particularly as some years back his work was considered to be somewhat diminished, apart from the hardened fans view that is.
This from someone who has heard the complete Tempest works -
"He now makes records the same way he tours - like he's issuing bulletins from one never-ending session of jump blues, clattering boogie, and dead man walking shuffles, cut in steady circular arrangements with his rail road groove road band". David Fricke. Mojo
This latest recording is not going to speak broadly to the troubled youth as he had once done but in the face of 21st Century American pop and rock music Bob Dylan embodies the very spirit and narrative of American musical culture from a previous century, and with a poets gift brings the story into the modern world. Shakespearean indeed.
When he says in the Tempest track Early Roman Kings "I ain't dead yet, My bell still rings" it's clear Bob Dylan has still not finished his story.
Here is Early Roman Kings.

john martyn

28th June,  John Martyn's birthday.
The stories are a myriad about the man, half of which you couldn't give any credence. It seems many have a John Martyn tale, either of loutish drunken behavior on the one side or to his personable generosity on the other.
But one thing is quite clear since his death in 2009 a large gap has been left in UK's music.
He'd had 4 decades of making his music a story that was deeply personal, "some people keep diaries, I make records." he said in the 1980's. A unique style of playing blended folk, jazz, blues, rock in way no one had done before or since. Live he would often use loop echoes, reverbs and phaser effects on the guitars and voice to the hypnotic soulful blues songs. A voice that was like the song style itself, blurred and atmospheric. His songs connected to both male and female such was the emotive content.
Martyn was also one of the few people who actually knew Nick Drake (see post) in the late 60's early 70's and writing what was to become one of his most well known songs as a tribute to him in 1973. Solid Air.
So no apologies here for having that track as a tribute to John Martyn. A powerful demonstration of Martyn's unique sound. From the 1973 album of the same name.

nick drake

"The folkies did not take to him; they wanted songs with choruses. They completely missed the point. He didn't say a word the entire evening. It was actually quite painful to watch. I don't know what the audience expected, I mean, they must have known they weren't going to get sea–shanties and sing-alongs at a Nick Drake gig"
.. that's folk singer Michael Chapman remembering Nick Drake.
John Martyn, a fellow songwriter who also knew him later described Drake as "the most withdrawn person he'd ever met".
Nick Drake was an enigma. His life ended at just 26 years old in 1974 by a medicanal overdose to help the suffering from depression and insomnia. It can't be described as suicide yet he seemed to have given up on life.
Ignored by most audiences during his days playing the colleges and small gigs in the late 60's and early seventies, partly due to his complete lack of spoken communication with the audience and partly his music was as quiet and inward as his on stage persona. A self-taught guitarist he used alternative tunings, which he meticulously tuned and retuned from one song to the other. The songs were plaintiff and somber. He seemed so inwardly focused it was like he just forgot there was an audience. In the main they just forgot about him.
He released three albums none of which sold many at the time. After the release of his third (1972's Pink Moon), he withdrew from both live performance and recording, retreating to his parents' home in rural Warwickshire where he died two years later.
Over two decades later these three albums were discovered to hold some of the most sensitive and melancholy songwriting put to record and a whole new audience heard his music for the first time. They now touched people who, somehow were sharing his deeply personal vision.
This excellent video is posted by his record label Island Records, and whoever had made it must have seen this as a small tribute to that lost soul. There's no known video footage of Drake only photographs.
19th June 1948 was Nick Drake's birthday and that's worth remembering through one of his now most well known songs "River Man" from the album "5 Leaves Left". A song that demonstrates the melancholy and inner thoughts that have now connected with many other people around the world.
Nick Drake did eventually get his songs to be heard.

dylan isn't digital

"You can't imagine a digital age bringing forth a Dylan.. the channels of communication would steal their veils one by one. How could a (new) Dylan possibly resist giving away in instalments what he once delivered in biannual blasts.. A Bob Dylan of the 21st century would find it impossible to avoid being engaged by his Facebook group.." David Hepworth. The Word. June. 2012
Although Twitter (until something else comes along) is the present delight for anyone with their self esteem switched on high enough to think the smallest detail of their lives is surely most noteworthy to everyone, we find in this digital babble that musicians, poets, actors, artists et al, who need to share their lives in this way are in fact all exactly the same. Ordinary.

Here's something extraordinary
15th June 1965 - Bob Dylan records "Like a Rolling Stone"

roy harper

Very good to see Roy Harper is headlining one of the UK's summer folk festival's this year (Moseley Folk Festival, 31st Aug, 1st & 2nd Sept).
After 4 decades of touring and recording he's obtained the genuine respect for never compromising in his song writing. His fans of course have always known this but in the last few years there's been more new comers to his music then ever before thanks to the video exposure of his music, YouTube etc.
These days Roy hand picks his gigs so you won't get many chances to catch this folk legend on tour but if his Albert Hall performance in 2011 is anything to go by you'll still get a performance of one of his most recognised and evocative songs 'The Same Old Rock' which he originally recorded with Jimmy Page. Page has been a long time mate even dedicating one of Led Zeppelins tracks to him.
Whether you know his 1970 'Stormcock' album or not there's never a wrong time to hear this song. Listen out for the duel riff guitars of Page and Harper at about 9.54. You don't often get to hear a 12 string played this well.

land of skies

Sylvia Rae Tracey sings an adaption from a poem by George Mackay Brown set to a video of superb time-lapse stills captured by the International Space Station Crew.

recorded at the garage

roger mcguinn

Roger McGuinn lead singer and guitarist with the Byrds wrote some of the most influential songs of the 1960's.
"During his time with The Byrds, McGuinn developed two innovative styles of electric guitar playing. The first was "jingle-jangle" – generating ringing arpeggios based on banjo finger picking styles – which influenced the folk rock genre. The second style was a droning (similar to the sitar) style of playing, heard in psychedelic rock." (edited from wiki)

In 1995 he set up a web site to archive folk, blues and other traditional music. By recording a song a month, a long with the lyrics and music score, he now has an amazing collection all available on The Folk Den.
The Folk Den Songs are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Which basically means there are Mp3 files and lyrics all free to download.
It is the project of a man who believes in music far beyond any commercial advantage but as a benefit for all people. The Folk Den is here.
There is also a fine podcast interview here - The Byrds' Roger McGuinn Works To Preserve Folk (via boing boing)

Here is McGuinn playing "Eight Miles High" at The ACL (Austin City Limits) in 1996 and boy does he give that 12-6 string hybrid a work out. Sensational stuff.

tom paxton

Tom Paxton had a big following in the late 1960's and with just his own songs and an acoustic guitar could easily hold a huge festival audience.
Widely known as a folk singer, Tom Paxton's songs cover a wide range of topics, from the serious and profound to the lighthearted and comical. He never shies away from the most difficult subjects for a song writer (even more recently 9/11), but he also has the lightest of touches when it comes to "short shelf life songs" or topical songs about current events and things in the news.  

Of the songwriters on the NY Greenwich Village scene of the 1960s, Dave Van Ronk said "Bob Dylan is usually cited as the founder of the new song movement.. but the person who started the whole thing was Tom Paxton.. he set himself a training regimen of deliberately writing one song every day. Dylan had not yet showed up when this was happening, and by the time Bobby came on the set, with at most two or three songs he had written, Tom was already singing at least 50 percent his own material. Prior to that, the folk community was very much tied to traditional songs, so much so that songwriters would sometimes palm their own stuff off as traditional".

Paxton describing his political views "that he belonged to no organized political party... Being young and impassioned almost automatically put me over on the radical side of most issues. Being older, I find myself still more or less there, somewhat to my surprise".
Happy Birthday Tom.
Here is a tale set during the Vietnam war...

bert jansch

Bert Jansch died in the early hours of this morning.
The Scottish musician was a founding member of the group Pentangle. They gave their most recent public performance in August 2011 when they reformed for the Cambridge Folk Festival.
He was a prominent figure in the folk revival of the 1960s and was honoured at the BBC Folk Awards with a lifetime achievement award.
His reputation as a virtuoso guitarist extended well beyond the folk circuit and he has often been cited as an influence by musicians such as Johnny Marr and Bernard Butler.
Neil Young, with whom Bert toured in 2010 has compared him to Jimi Hendrix for his ability and innovative playing.
"As much of a great guitar player as Jimi was, Bert Jansch is the same thing for acoustic guitar - and my favourite,"
Here is Bert playing one of his compositions 'Downunder' in 2010.